One Fearful Yellow Eye by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

had gotten Karl out and into the States less than a year earlier. He was an apprentice, learning sheet-metal work. Fort said he seemed like a very decent kid. Gretchen gave birth to a girl. They named her Susan. Through his lawyer, a man who has since died, Fort arranged the annuity in the name of Susan Kemmer with the money to be paid monthly to her parent or guardian until she reached eighteen, and then paid directly to her."
    "How did Gretchen react to that?"
    "Not so great. She blamed her mother for not siding with her to get Fort to marry her. Fort said that while Anna and Gretchen were still getting along, Anna enjoyed being a grandmother. Then the marriage started to go bad. Maybe Karl Kemmer resented the bargain he made. Gretchen started going with other men. Fort said she and Anna had battles about it. When Susan was three, Gretchen had a little boy. When the little boy was a year old, Karl Kemmer was killed in an industrial accident. After another quarrel, Gretchen left town suddenly with a married man, taking both children with her. Fort said Anna was grim and remote and unapproachable for a time, and then she became herself again. But she would not mention Gretchen. She told Fort she did not have a daughter."
    "So it had to be Gretchen who tried to shake Fort down a couple of years ago?"
    "Three years ago next month. She waylaid him at the hospital. She said she didn't want to come here because she didn't want her mother to know she was back in Chicago. She'd been back three months. She didn't want her mother to know that things hadn't gone too well for her. Fort said she was heavy and coarsened, but sexy in a full-blown blowzy way. She said she was doing waitress work in a restaurant on West Lake Street, and living with her five kids in a fourth-floor walkup in the Maywood section. She had married somebody out West. I can't remember the name he told me. And she'd had three children by him and one had died, and she had married another man and had one child by him who was then three years old. I can't remember the third husband's name either, but she told Fort he was in prison. She said that even with the money coming in for Susan, she couldn't seem to make ends meet, so she'd come to tell him he had to start sending her another hundred a week."
    "Just like that, eh?"
    "It irritated Fort and it puzzled him that she should put it in the form of a demand, and look so perfectly sure of herself. So he asked her why she thought he'd do that. So she said she'd found out he'd just moved into a fine new house and he had a new young wife and probably the new young wife thought she'd married a great man, but she wondered how the new young wife would react if Gretchen paid her a little visit and told her that while his first wife was on her death bed, the big famous Dr. Geis was busy knocking up a young dumb kid, his housekeeper's daughter, right in the same house, every night for weeks. Fort said he wasn't irritated anymore. Just sad. So he told her about how he and I had no secrets, and he had told me the whole thing, so there wasn't any way she could put that kind of pressure on him. Then in that gentle way of his he asked her why she would try such a thing, and why she would make what had happened between Page 21

    them, foolish as it might have been, sound so much dirtier than it had actually been. So she began to cry and she told him that her husband had told her to try it. He realized that she was basically unchanged. She was still a slow-minded, amiable, romantic kind of person. He said he would look into her situation and see if he could give her some help if she really needed it."
    "I would guess she did."
    She explained that Fort hired investigators to make a full report, and asked them to go into detail about the daughter Susan, age fourteen then. He showed Glory the report. It said she had been the common-law wife of the man out West and she was the common-law wife of the man in prison in Wisconsin. She was a